Richter gazed through the windscreen at the terrain a bare two hundred feet below them. The moon was low in the eastern sky but illuminated the landscape reasonably well, and what he could see of it didn’t look inviting. The word ‘desert’ tends to conjure up images of golden sand dunes extending in gentle waves to a cloudless blue horizon, but the Algerian desert was very different. It was fairly flat, which was the good news, but the ground was studded with rocks that cast long shadows in the moonlight. It looked like the kind of surface where Richter would have thought twice about landing a helicopter, far less a seventy-ton fixed-wing aircraft, even one optimized for rough-ground operations.
‘Are you going to be able to land safely on that crap?’ he asked.
‘On that, no,’ Johnson replied, ‘but the area the eyes in the sky have located for us is fairly clear of rocks. We’ll do a pass over it first, just to check, and if it looks OK we’ll put the Herc down.’
‘And if it isn’t?’
‘We’ll opt for Plan B, head on to the second landing area, and try there. It’ll mean a longer drive for you and the Regiment guys, that’s all. And if we can’t land there either, we’ll turn round and fly you back to Morocco in time for breakfast.’
‘That isn’t really an option,’ Richter argued. ‘We have to do this. Somehow you have to get us down there.’
‘I know, but trust us, we’ve done this before. This Herky-bird can land pretty much anywhere.’ Johnson paused for a few seconds. ‘Look, we weren’t privy to your briefing, but what the hell’s going on in Algeria that’s caused half the Mobility Troop of an SAS Sabre Squadron to be scrambled? We aren’t at war with these guys, are we?’
‘Not yet, as far as I know, but the Algerians are on edge. There’s an extremist terrorist group called GIA operating within the country. They consider anybody who isn’t a Muslim as fair game, so they’ve assassinated tens of thousands of fellow Algerians and a bunch of foreigners since ninety-two. According to some authorities, Algeria is the single most dangerous country in the world to visit, including Iraq and Afghanistan.’
‘That must be a real comfort to you.’
Richter grinned at him. ‘You said it. To answer your question, this is a classified mission, but it’s really pretty simple: we’re doing the Americans a favour. Their Keyhole birds have picked up unusual activity at several Algerian military bases – increased patrols by fighter planes, extra guards posted, that kind of thing – and at Aïn Oussera they’ve cordoned off one particular hangar and posted armed guards around it. The Americans are worried that Algeria might be working up its forces to launch an attack on Libya, or maybe Morocco.’
‘You’re kidding.’
Richter smiled grimly in the gloom of the cockpit. ‘Unfortunately not, though I don’t think the Yanks have any real clue about this region.’
‘Or anywhere else east of New York.’
‘There’s that too. But something’s going on out here, which is why we’re bouncing around in this bag of bolts instead of tucked up in bed back at home.’
‘So what’s with the hangar?’
‘That’s what we’re here to find out. The Americans reckon the Algerians might have a bunch of new aircraft, or maybe even a nuke or two, tucked away at Aïn Oussera. The only way to find out is to get someone to take a peep inside the building. And that someone is me.’
‘But you’re not SAS, right?’ Johnson asked. ‘You’re a spook.’
‘I’ve been called worse,’ Richter admitted. ‘If I was still in the Navy, I’d be the SLJO.’
‘Right – “Shitty Little Jobs Officer”? We’ve got one of those.’
‘Everyone has. And in my section it’s usually me.’
Yellow Sea, south of Suri-bong, North Korea
Yi Min-Ho opened the wheelhouse door of the fishing boat and stepped inside. He nodded to the skipper and walked over to the radar display, dimly illuminated by red lighting, and peered at the screen.
‘We’re clear,’ the captain confirmed. A middle-aged South Korean who’d spent his entire life as a professional fisherman, he was quietly pleased that his vessel had been selected for this task. However, he wouldn’t ever admit that either to his crew or to the slightly arrogant junior NIS officer now in front of him, who would be carrying out the mission itself.
‘No contacts within five miles of us, and nothing moving on the coast. We’re tracking south-east, speed just over two knots.’
Yi Min-Ho was tall for a Korean, with pleasant, regular features, but his ingrained air of authority – or perhaps superiority – had already caused some friction on board. ‘And the radar detector?’ he demanded.
Although in most respects the craft was just a fishing boat, and would pass any routine inspection by a North Korean patrol, it had been fitted with several extra items of equipment, all either cleverly concealed or designed to be easily ditched if the vessel looked likely to be boarded. The radar-warning receiver was one of these items.
‘We’re currently being illuminated by normal coastal surveillance radars, but no signs of anything unusual.’
The fishing boat had made exactly the same journey three times a week for the last month, leaving Inchon in South Korea in mid-afternoon and sailing west into the Yellow Sea. Its route took it to a point about twenty miles north-west of the island of Baegryeong-do, before the craft turned south-east, passing between that island and the mainland, and then paralleling the North Korean coast for a while before returning to its home port.
On every one of those trips, except this one, all the crew had done was catch fish. Twice patrol boats had approached them closely, but on neither occasion was the vessel boarded. Two days earlier, the National Intelligence Service – South Korea’s espionage agency – had decided that the mission was a ‘go’, and Yi Min-Ho had finally embarked on the fishing boat. With him came two bulky containers, each of which had needed two men to lift, and a single haversack holding his personal equipment.
The boat had already made the turn north-west of Baegryeong-do, so the vessel was now about midway between the island and the largely uninhabited peninsula of Kuksa-bong, virtually the most westerly point of North Korea, jutting out sharply into the Yellow Sea.
‘It’s time,’ Yi said.
The skipper nodded agreement, set the autopilot, and followed the NIS officer out onto the deck, where three crewmen stood waiting.
‘Open them,’ Yi ordered.
One of the seamen produced a knife and sliced through the cord securing the lid of the container. He swiftly unlaced the cord from the eyelets, then flipped off the fabric lid to reveal the contents. In the glow cast by the deck lights – for obvious reasons the fishing boat was displaying the normal lights any patrol craft’s captain would expect to see – it appeared to contain just a single lump of black rubber.
Protruding from one corner of it was a short but rigid hose, which another crewman now attached to a petrol-powered compressor standing ready on deck. Having secured it, he bent over the compressor, flicked a switch and pulled the starter cord. The engine roared into life, then settled down to a steady thrum. Almost immediately the black object began expanding, as the air rushed into it. An inflatable boat was already beginning to take shape.
Yi Min-Ho watched its progress for a few seconds, then turned his attention to the second container. After the lid was flipped back, two of the crewmen bent over to extract an outboard motor, and placed it carefully on the deck. A small toolkit followed it, then a twenty-five-litre can of ready-mixed fuel. The outboard had a bulky and unfamiliar look to it, caused partly by its silenced exhaust but mainly by a thick, soft cover enveloping the entire motor apart from the control arm. This was made of anechoic fabric, designed to absorb radar waves. The NIS had calculated that, despite the mass of metal in the outboard motor, the boat would have an insignificant radar signature, about the same as a large bird.
Yi nodded to the skipper, and headed back to the wheelhouse to make a last check of both the radar
screen and the radar-warning receiver, and finally to pick up his haversack. He was wearing an all-black jumpsuit, under which were a camouflage-pattern jacket and trousers. In the haversack was all the equipment he hoped he might need to survive for a week in North Korea: a Kyocera SS66K Iridium satellite phone and spare battery, providing his lifeline to the boat due to pick him up once his mission was over; a Czechoslovakian CZ75 nine-millimetre semi-automatic pistol with two spare magazines, both fully charged; a GPS receiver; a pair of compact binoculars; a map; a notebook and pencil; seven days’ worth of American-issue MRE rations and five bottles of water.
By the time he walked back onto the deck, the compressor had fallen silent. The four-metre-long boat was now fully inflated, and had already been lowered over the side of the fishing vessel facing away from the mainland, just in case anyone there was watching them through night-vision glasses. The inflatable was carefully secured by a line, while two of the crewmen, one wearing an all-black jumpsuit identical to Yi’s, were fixing the outboard motor to the wooden transom of the little rubber boat.
With the motor safely in place, the crewmen filled up its tank from the fuel can, and then both climbed back into the fishing boat.
‘Are you ready?’ the skipper asked. As Yi nodded, he continued, ‘We’ll see you in about a week.’
The two black-clad figures then scrambled over the side into the inflatable, and one of the other crewmen passed down Yi’s haversack. The outboard motor started at first pull, the engine barely audible. The inflatable eased away from the side of the fishing boat and turned east towards the coast of North Korea. The sea was calm, which was just as well, because the inflatable had a long way to go. About twenty miles to the drop-off point, and another fifteen back to where the fishing boat would then be waiting.
Within seconds the small craft and its occupants were invisible against the darkness of the water.
Algeria
The loadmaster reappeared in the hold, checked that everyone there was wearing a headset, and then gave Richter a thumbs-up as he sat down.
‘We’re about sixty seconds from the first landing strip,’ the captain announced, his voice clear enough through the intercom. ‘We’ll do a low-level fly-by to check the surface, and if it looks OK we’ll land. Check your belts are tight and hold on.’
The Hercules sank even lower, then lurched up slightly, levelling at about one hundred feet.
In the cockpit, the captain had switched on the set of landing lights filtered for NVG use, and was peering through his night-vision glasses at the ground below the aircraft. If he was going to land here, he wanted to be absolutely sure he could do so safely and, even more important, take off again afterwards.
From the cockpit, the desert surface looked firm, and though there were plenty of rocks and a few stunted shrubs evident, none of them looked big enough to do the aircraft any damage.
‘Good enough,’ the captain said. ‘Let’s put her down.’
He discarded his NVGs, pulled the aircraft round in a tight turn to starboard, climbed back up to three hundred feet and started what at an airfield would have been called the downwind leg.
‘Landing checks.’
The co-pilot ran through the list, as the rumble of the main landing gear being lowered echoed through the hold, audible even over the howl of the engines. The Hercules banked steeply to starboard, the pilot holding the turn and easing it onto a final approach heading. He levelled the wings, switched on the normal landing lights and pulled the throttles back, and the C-130 sank gently towards the ground.
The SAS troops rapidly checked their equipment and weapons. Then they held on tight.
‘Alpha and Bravo, check in,’ Dekker ordered, and was rewarded by seven voices responding on their secure radios in proper sequence. Richter was the odd man out, in more ways than one, and he found himself using the radio callsign ‘Spook’, simply because Dekker liked the sound of it.
Touchdown was much bumpier than Richter had expected, the Hercules bouncing violently several times as its speed dropped away. Even before the aircraft came to rest, and the piercing whine of the engines had fallen to a more bearable level, the SAS troopers had unclipped their seatbelts and stood up. Two of them were already releasing the securing straps on the Land Rovers before the loadmaster stepped across to the ramp controls. The remaining five men, plus Richter and Dekker, headed to the rear of the hold and waited. The loadmaster studied the group, noting that all the men had their Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine-guns cocked and held ready, then began lowering the ramp.
Immediately, the lights in the hold extinguished, and they saw a slowly extending oblong open up in front of them, a dark blue sky studded with stars. Then the surface of the desert itself appeared. The moment the ramp grounded, the SAS troopers thundered down it and fanned out, alert for any sign of danger.
In the hold, the engines of the two Pinkies started simultaneously, then they rolled down the ramp and stopped side by side. Once everyone had climbed on board, Dekker checked that all the GPS units were indicating the same location, and that both the satellite navigation systems were working properly. They had to be able to find their objective swiftly and, equally important, find their way back to the Hercules once this operation was over.
Dekker carried out a final radio check to ensure that everyone was on the net, then gave the order to advance. Behind them, the ramp closed and the noise of the C-130’s engines rose to a roar as the pilot began manoeuvring the aircraft into a take-off position. Once he was satisfied, he would shut down the engines and simply wait for the team to return.
They knew it was going to be an uncomfortable ten miles – the satellite photographs had made that abundantly clear – but they weren’t prepared for just how rough the desert terrain actually was. Picking a suitable path through the rocks and boulders tested both drivers to the limit, and they weren’t helped by the covers over their headlamps that reduced the normal beam by about eighty per cent. Richter was hoping to get in and out of Algeria undetected, and bright lights can show up a long way off in the desert. Sound travels far as well, so the vehicles’ engines were fitted with additional silencers, and the engine bays packed with sound-insulating material to reduce the risk of being heard.
Under normal conditions, driving this distance should have taken about twenty to thirty minutes, but it was nearly three quarters of an hour before Dekker looked up from his navigation system and ordered the vehicles to stop. They were now just under a mile from the airfield boundary, nine miles from the waiting Hercules, and that was as close as they could risk taking the Pinkies.
Dekker ordered the two drivers to stay with their vehicles, then led the rest of his men, Richter tagging along behind, towards the east and to Aïn Oussera.
Twenty minutes later they were lying prone on the summit of a slight rise, as Dekker and Richter studied the layout of the airfield directly in front of them.
South of Suri-bong, North Korea
The north coast of the Kuksa-bong peninsula is partially cultivated, but west of Kama-san the south coast is essentially uninhabited. The reason almost nobody lived there was the same reason that Yi Min-Ho couldn’t land there: an extremely inhospitable terrain cut through with deep, heavily wooded valleys ending in steep cliffs overlooking the sea. Instead, the plan called for him to be landed south of Suri-bong, on the north side of the bay known as Daito-wan. Yi himself would have preferred a location even further east, but that was impossible because of the logistics of getting the inflatable back to the fishing boat, and it would also have greatly increased the possibility of detection.
About five hundred metres off the coast the crewman eased the inflatable to a virtual standstill and cut the engine. The boat rocked gently on the waves while the two men scanned the shore through image-intensifying binoculars, looking and listening for any sign of life or movement, but the coastline appeared almost deserted. They could see a few lights – probably from oil lamps, since the mains electricity supply in Nor
th Korea is, to put it mildly, erratic – signifying isolated dwellings, but there were no large settlements in this region.
At a gesture from Yi Min-Ho, the crewman restarted the engine and steered towards the beach. This was perhaps the most dangerous phase of the entire operation, and they proceeded very cautiously, checking all around them – not just on the beach ahead – as they neared landfall. Both knew the fate that would await them if they were caught by the North Korean security forces.
The moment the inflatable touched the beach, the crewman jumped out and held the bow steady while Yi Min-Ho shrugged his haversack onto his back and climbed out, his boots crunching on the pebbles. Without a backward glance, the crewman immediately pushed the inflatable away from the beach, and climbed back into it.
Yi looked back once, checking that the boat was well clear of the strand and already heading south-west to rendezvous with the fishing boat, then he tramped across to the cover of the trees that bordered the shore. There he stopped, put down his haversack and took out the Kyocera satellite phone and the GPS receiver to check precisely his current position. He’d landed almost exactly where they’d calculated, and this he hoped was a good omen. He next switched on the Kyocera, made a call that lasted less than fifteen seconds, then turned the unit off.
Yi hefted the haversack onto his back again, tucked the GPS receiver into one of his pockets, and started walking. His destination lay some fifteen kilometres directly to the east, but he would probably have to walk about double that distance. He couldn’t cover the entire route in darkness, but the final section of his journey would be in the hill country south of Kungnak-san, where he could probably travel safely in daylight. If nothing unexpected occurred, he should be in position sometime the following morning.
Aïn Oussera Air Base, Algeria
The base looked almost deserted in the ghostly green light of the image intensifier, but Richter could see at least a dozen sentries posted around the hangars ranged inside the boundary fence. Most seemed to be smoking, the sudden flares of brightness unmistakable through the NVGs. That was good news from the point of view of the SAS team, because sentries with lighted cigarettes give away their positions every time they draw in a lungful of tobacco smoke, but also have degraded night vision and are less likely to be fully alert.
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